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News: Trying out Opera 10

Added 04 September 2009, 12:38 PM
This is some feedback on Opera. One of the Opera employees caught me twittering and said I should report usability issues, but I can only find where to report bugs on the site (after only a quick look) – so I am posting this in a blog post. Other people may find it interesting anyway.


The browser toolbar on e.g. Firefox takes two close-together clicks to open a familiar site from somewhere you are already at. SpeedDial takes 3 because you need to first close the tab you're on - small, but annoying as I do this dozens of times per day. Plus with SpeedDial you need to move the mouse around a lot to do it.

Opening Firebug is one click, and it opens fairly close to the mouse- opening DragonFly is at least two, and they are on the menu bar (top) when DragonFly appears on the bottom.

DragonFly keeps reloading pages when I use it. Not sure why, but possibly it is when I select a button/link when using the inspector tool - it should select for inspection not click when doing this.

If I switch tabs DragonFly does not follow the tab. Annoying if for example comparing two DOM trees when debugging.

DragonFly does not allow me to turn properties on or off easily - I have to remove them entirely.

There's not enough contrast between the on/off states on the DragonFly icons (both have a green background). When first opening a Firebug user will click the arrow and it'll stay green so they think they've just turned it on. You then move the mouse and see the current area being highlighted but clicking does not work. So to recap two problems:
  • Don't use pale green for off, just use white.
  • Don't do the "follow cursor" effect when the inspect tool isn't on, it's pointless and leads to confusion when clicking does not work.

I really don't want to see the browser context menu when right clicking in DragonFly, I either want nothing or something relevant to DragonFly. As it is now it is a big lumbering inappropriate thing that pops up when I want something useful.

Opera Software did a great job putting in features from popular Firefox addons. But I'd like them to go further- I want screen grabbing, a measuring rules I can drag, and a colour picker (to select what colours are used on pages).

The name "My Opera" is confusing. When I search for "Opera" things like "My Opera Feedback" come up and I think "Oh, yes, I want to give feedback to (my) Opera". I understand renaming that would be a big pain though.

Please support OpenSearch. Custom searches are nice, but the ability to just grab a search plugin is a lot nicer, and many sites now provide these via <link> tags.


Generally the browser is very fast and responsive, and Opera has done a lot to improve usability. Generally it's an excellent browser, they just need to keep working on making sure common tasks are smooth.

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Thanks for the great feedback!

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Hi Chris,
actually it was somebody's blog on My Opera that brought me to the ocportal.com site (your CMS looks great and is very well presented BTW, I'm going to try it out at some point!) - from there I followed links to twitter, where I was happy to see you twittering about Opera 10 :). I intended to send you my E-mail address but I ran out of characters - a blog post is of course even better ;)

Good points all around - some answers here:

* Speed dial - if you use the shortcuts ([ctrl]+relevant number) you can jump from anywhere to your chosen site. You can also use the back button until you get to the speed dial screen.

* Dragonfly reloads - this occurs when you select a page to debug, in order to set up JavaScript debugging environment. You can disable the automated re-load in Dragonfly preferences, in this case you'll have to re-load manually before using the JavaScript debug functionality.

We'll be working on the other stuff. Happy debugging :)

Hallvord R. M. Steen (hallvord at opera if you have questions or issues)

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Great :).

With speed dial, it'd be pretty cool if you could do something like hold down alt and have it overlay across the browser window (until you stop pressing alt); from this mode a speeddial click would replace the tab you're on. Hot keys are nice, but I for sure cannot remember more than a hand full of them.
Slight errata to my blog post: it's one click to open a Firefox toolbar link, not two.

The problem with the back button, is I do a lot of "Open in background tab" and I don't think one of those tabs would go back as far as Speeddial.

Also on DragonFly, generally make it as easy to manipulate styles as on Firebug. Firebug has revolutionised web development (and raised expectations), and a lot of people use the CSS editing intensely. It needs to be really easy and intuitive to add, remove, and disable styles.

Thanks again, it's great you're being receptive and active. If I get more issues I'll e-mail you.

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And one more thing I've noticed, the Error Console can get full of errors about missing CSS properties that are browser extension ones. It should be smart enough to filter out anything that starts with "-" (e.g. -moz-border-radius or -webkit-border-radius).

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A couple more things with tabs…

I really miss Firefox's ctrl+click to open in a new tab. I've read there are workarounds, but at the very least it should be a setting you can tweak visually - it shouldn't involve opera:config.

If you open a lot of tabs, the tabs get too tiny to click. Firefox hides the excess ones behind a little dropdown if there are too many.

Lots of tabs and ctrl+click are things I quite commonly do if for example working through a lot of pages checking them.

tabs and ctrl-click

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Opera had shift-click to open in new tab and ctrl-shift-click to open in background tab since Opera 2 or something  :P I was sure it could be changed to ctrl-click for shift-click in the shortcut options but surprisingly the only thing I found was
Ctrl click link in background in Opera, plus all target blank links in background. - User JavaScript - Opera Community

Enabling the extender menu on tabs is trivial though: right-click the tab bar, choose customize > appearance and change the "Wrapping" setting.


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